Chicago Botanic Garden

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Inside the Chicago Botanic Garden; view of a lake and different flora.

The Chicago Botanic Garden is a 385 acre (1.56 km²) botanical garden in Glencoe, Illinois. It is located within the Cook County Forest Preserve District, a belt of more than 68,000 acres (275 km²) of open space that surrounds the city of Chicago, Illinois. It is open daily except Christmas Day. Admission is free; however, there is a substantial fee for parking a motor vehicle ($12.00 as of 2006). The gardens can also be reached using the Pace route #213 and Braeside Station on the Metra UP North Line is within easy walking distance. More than 750,000 entrants visited the garden in 2005.

The garden is operated by the Chicago Horticultural Society, founded 1890, for collections, education, and research. Its ground-breaking was in 1965, with the official opening in 1972. The address of the garden is 1000 Lake Cook Road, Glencoe IL 60022. The Chicago Botanic Garden is located minutes away from Ravinia Festval, a world class outdoor music theatre. The Green Bay Trail, which is a walking and bike path leads from the garden to the Ravinia business district.The business district includes stores and restaurants such as Happy Sushi, Ravinia Grill, Sloppy Jo's Lunchroom, Java Love, and Pierro's Pizza.

Today the garden contains some 2.2 million plants representing 8,310 taxa, displayed in landscape settings. One-third of the site is devoted to horticultural display; another third is native habitats; and the remaining third is lakes and facilities. Its 23 major gardens and natural areas are as follows:

Aquatic Garden - waterlilies and lotuses.

Bulb Garden - a fine display of flowering bulbs.

Circle Garden - a formal garden of annual flowers, with flowering trees, evergreens, and shrubs.

Dixon Prairie - restored prairies (15 acres), featuring six prairie types once common to northeastern Illinois (Bur Oak Savanna, Fen Prairie, Gravel Hill Prairie, Sand Prairie, Tallgrass or Mesic Prairie, Wet Prairie).

Dwarf Conifer Garden - dwarf and slow-growing conifers.

Enabling Garden - demonstration garden for making gardening accessible to everyone.

English Oak Meadow - a flowering sweep of bulbs, fragrant annuals, and flowering shrubs set between Asian, English, and native oaks.

English Walled Garden - 6 garden "rooms" in English gardening styles (Vista Garden, Cottage Garden, Pergola Garden, Daisy Garden, Courtyard Garden and Checkerboard Garden).

Inside the Japanese Garden.

Evening Island - 5 acres of hillside, woodland and meadow gardens in the New American Garden style, including 66,000 perennials of 66 species, along with 13,400 ornamental grasses of 12 species.

Fruit & Vegetable Garden - demonstration garden for edible fruits and vegetables.

The Greenhouses - 3 greenhouses (semitropical, tropical, arid) designed by architect Edward L. Barnes in 1978.

Heritage Garden - modeled after Europe's first botanical garden in Padua, Italy, and divided into four quadrants highlighting the major plant families and geographic regions of the world.

Malott Japanese Garden - Sansho-En, "the garden of three islands," designed as a Japanese stroll garden with curving paths, featuring tea ceremonies in the Shoin Building, a recreation of a 17th-century samurai's retreat.

Lakeside Gardens - 1.25 miles circling the Great Basin, with 130 crabapple trees, as well as daffodils, tulips, and perennials such as daylilies, geraniums, and asters.

Landscape Gardens - demonstration gardens for home landscapes, with plants hardy for the Chicago region.

McDonald Woods - 100-acre restored oak woodland.

One of the garden's interconnected lakes.

Native Plant Garden - three distinct communities of Illinois native plants (woodland, prairie, habitat).

Rose Garden - more than 5,000 rose bushes.

Sensory Garden - emphasizing scents, sounds, colors and texture.

Shade Plant Evaluation Garden - testing area for evaluating the performance of shade-loving plants for the Chicago area.

Skokie River - one-mile (1.6 km) stretch of river, serving as a demonstration site for natural methods to control erosion, improve water quality, and increase biological diversity.

Spider Island - an island meadow with naturalistic plantings of trees, grasses and native wildflowers, surrounded by birches, alders and serviceberries.

Sun Plant Evaluation Garden - testing area for evaluating the performance of sun-loving plants for the Chicago area.

Water Gardens - a major aquatic plant collection with more than 165,000 aquatic plants, including showy displays of lotuses and waterlilies, as well as 157 taxa of native aquatic plants.